The robots exclusion standard or robots.txt protocol is a convention to prevent cooperating web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website. The information specifying the parts that should not be accessed is specified in a file called robots.txt in the top-level directory of the website.
The robots.txt protocol was created by consensus in June 1994 by members of the robots mailing list (robots-request@nexor.co.uk). There is no official standards body or RFC for the protocol.
The protocol is purely advisory. It relies on the cooperation of the web robot, so that marking an area of your site out of bounds with robots.txt does not guarantee privacy. Many website administrators have been caught trying to use the robots file to make private parts of a website invisible to the rest of the world. However, the file is necessarily publicly available and is easily checked by anyone with a web browser.
The robots.txt patterns are matched by simple substring comparisons, so care should be taken to make sure that patterns matching directories have the final '/' character appended: otherwise all files with names starting with that substring will match, rather than just those in the directory intended.
This example allows all robots to visit all files because the wildcard "*" specifies all robots.
User-agent: *
Disallow:
This example keeps all robots out:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
The next is an example that tells all crawlers not to enter into four directories of a website:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/
Example that tells a specific crawler not to enter one specific directory:
User-agent: BadBot
Disallow: /private/
Warning : Do not use
Disallow: *
HTML meta tags can be used to exclude robots according to the contents of web pages. Again, this is purely advisory, and also relies on the cooperation of the robot programs. For example:
<meta name="Robots" content="Noindex,Nofollow" />
If you don't have the time to implement robots.txt on your site or you would like me to assist you, please contact me today for a free quote. I look forward to hearing from you soon.
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